Empathy

One genome

In many walks of life we balance the individual desire and need with the common purpose. It is perhaps worth wondering why is there an expression of interest in the common welfare at all. Why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people, empathy is engrained in our make-ups. If we even hear of a tragic story regarding a child we have never met, we may feel sadness, we may even shed a tear. Where is the evolutionary logic to it.

Interestingly studies of the human genome would indicate that we have is not a mere code of our own individual identity but rather an individual stockpile of all of life represnted in out DNA. And so, we know that whether it is another human, another animal, or indeed anything we deem to be living; we really are all closely related

Human Cooperation

Looking at our individual genetic histories, of course, there are a million near tragedies to the amoebas, the primates and the humans that survived or your grandparent that nearly contracted a fatal illnes just beofre your parent was conceived and on and on to near infinity that can be applied to the phrase ‘you are lucky to be alive’; to allow for you and I. That the chemical interactions at our very beginnings morphed to autonomous living cellular entities is clear, if the how exactly is not yet. But what of the notion of individualistic evolution?  It is clear that cooperation greatly increased our capacity to evolve and is also deeply engrained.

Looking at a hypothetical moment in our history where we may have battled with another primate or any other creature; and we look to our ingenuity as the core of our successful survival, but why be ingenious, why care as an individual if one of my tribe is killed by a creature or indeed an environmental event. It is the empathy felt by this tribe, the anger and fear at the sight of a young baby dead that will coerce us to develop our defences against those creatures, or that storm, or that disease; that we would dedicate ourselves to the voyage of medicinal care and discovery.

Separation

We do not know what the world of next year will be and yet this lack of knowledged is unlikely to be a reason for wishing to die this year

In many discussions it seems the merits of pursuing means of defeating death are set upon by arguements that concentrate on dystopic or otherwise projections of future times and substrates and so on. I believe this is illogical and I believe the separation between wanting to survive beyond the normal biological limitations and pondering what will happen in this future or that future is necessary

Odd Creatures and Beliefs

Odd People.

 

Essentially, we live in an odd place, but it is what it is and one certainty about us is that we can adapt. If we awoke to a blue sun and orange sky –we would find it strange, and if aliens arrived and took over all forms of power – again different, but we would still go to the toilet, indeed we would still awake and get on with it, as shocking as these things are.

  

However, juxtaposing this is a great reluctance to change and a fear of the unknown. It is easy to see from an evolutionary perspective why we would have acquired this reticence to embrace the unfamiliar. Early man would not look at a snake, pick it up, and wonder if it was something that could be cuddled. We instinctively fear anything we are not familiar with. We also, like to have consensus among our peers that something is ok, normal, non-poisonous etc. (I just would like to see them pick it up and cuddle it first!) and so are further stalled while we await a critical mass of people to accept something new.

What of Religion

It might be useful to imagine the world and the history of man in the world while considering that there is no God. If one contemplates a reality where religion, despite being a set of beliefs held the vast majority of people over the vast majority of time is in fact a result of peoples lack of understanding, much in the line of a ‘flat world’. Perhaps one can see religion as an attempt to explain that which at different times was inexplicable (early Gods of a wide variety of incomprehensible phenomenon such as thunder, sea and sun; and the residual God of Man), or as a psychological necessity – a coping mechanism for the eventuality of death; or, indeed, as a tool used by many to add weight or significance to their voices.

 

In any event, to revisit the history of religion itself very thoroughly through the prism of these concepts may be very useful in looking at the innumerable philosophical and humanistic implications for such a project such as this and the idea generally that humanity expressed its hopes in the attributes it placed on god’s and afterlifes. And so with omniscience, omnipotence, eternal bliss, equality; but also power, abuse of privilege, deceit and conceit we see the projections of humanities potential destinies and desires as their ability to control their own destiny increases

Memories

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Nothing without Memories

There is a definite existential argument as to whether me less my memories is really me, or indeed, then worthy of the effort at the base of this whole project. Now one might counter that if given the option between death and having a complete retrograde amnesia from an accident etc. and so coming to as me but minus any prior memories and with the capacity to make new ones, then the latter might be preferable.

 

It is also clear that memory is going to be a very hard nut to decipher, moving from hippocampus to cortex and seemingly connected through an immense number of synapses with multi-faceted, multi-sensory potential stimuli of recall. However, again we can say that whatever it is, it is ‘in there’ in us.

Nanotech synaptic level internal and ongoing imaging of ‘Our Connectome’ would be one clear way of  storing the informational patterns that make up our memories ;declarative and non-declarative. However, this technology may be some way off.

Would it not be nice of our long-term memories were stored somewhere for ease of imaging this would mean that just a DNA sample would be required for recreation with memories intact; in fact, this would also offer the possibility of retrieval from the already departed. We would in short have done ourselves a major evolutionary favour. Well take a look at the following article from the ‘New Scientist’

DNA Methylation

Memories may be stored on your DNA

02 December 2008 by Devin Powell, Washington DC

REMEMBER your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical “caps” on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories.

To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery.

Now Courtney Miller and David Sweatt of the University of Alabama in Birmingham say that long-term memories may be preserved by a process called DNA methylation – the addition of chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA.

Many genes are already coated with methyl groups. When a cell divides, this “cellular memory” is passed on and tells the new cell what type it is – a kidney cell, for example. Miller and Sweatt argue that in neurons, methyl groups also help to control the exact pattern of protein expression needed to maintain the synapses that make up memories.

They started by looking at short-term memories. When caged mice are given a small electric shock, they normally freeze in fear when returned to the cage. However, then injecting them with a drug to inhibit methylation seemed to erase any memory of the shock. The researchers also showed that in untreated mice, gene methylation changed rapidly in the hippocampus region of the brain for an hour following the shock. But a day later, it had returned to normal, suggesting that methylation was involved in creating short-term memories in the hippocampus (Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.02.022).

To see whether methylation plays a part in the formation of long-term memories, Miller and Sweatt repeated the experiment, this time looking at the uppermost layers of the brain, called the cortex.

They found that a day after the shock, methyl groups were being removed from a gene called calcineurin and added to another gene. Because the exact pattern of methylation eventually stabilised and then stayed constant for seven days, when the experiment ended, the researchers say the methyl changes may be anchoring the memory of the shock into long-term memory, not just controlling a process involved in memory formation.

“We think we’re seeing short-term memories forming in the hippocampus and slowly turning into long-term memories in the cortex,” says Miller, who presented the results last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC.

“The cool idea here is that the brain could be borrowing a form of cellular memory from developmental biology to use for what we think of as memory,” says Marcelo Wood, who researches long-term memory at the University of California, Irvine.

Singularities

There are many considerations from Ray Kurzweil and others regarding the exponential growth of technology, and the possibility of reaching a singularity, or a point of near infinity. Mr Kurzweil acknowledges the mathematical constraints of the notion of as singularity and the notion of machines becoming capable of processes we as yet can not fathom is, obviously, none the weaker for this admittance.

One could argue if we have found one yet whether in the big bang theory or the edge of a black hole it still conforms to Einstein’s speed limit – the speed of light. This may again provide the end-point of acceleration as the complexity of the human and biological based intelligence is transformed into a matter more malleable to attaining that speed. And on attaining that speed or being involved as a form of matter or energy we could exist as a different form in the merry dance of matter and energy, of velocity and time.

Because we know that the processes that occur in our minds, while there is a major amount of parallelism that occurs and will need replication; are many times slower than that which we can cause in an electronic realm. And so as our processes speed up, my time relative to the current physical realm slows down, and combining this with the attempts to take the physical or electronic, or hybrid environment beyond a point in time when matter no longer exists via a two brane collision or any other such occurrence; then with these two elongating processes surely we will get pretty close to singularity. In other words a day in the second life may take a tiny part of a second in this realm; and while we look at a universal lifespan of a trillion years, or perhaps without end – then the notion of having this second existence open to us for a ‘really’ long time rings true

In this is more than enough room for the assistance of a machine that is smarter in every way than ourselves. And, of course in as much as we can see our future as one in a virtual realm – this ‘machine’ and these processes may well become a part of our essence. We must decide then to maintain that which we wish to maintain, our freewill that will allow me to decide if I wish to be enhanced (either here in the physical realm or in the electronic substrate – I may well wish to stay as I am by replicating all here, there. I may find myself playing a round of golf shortly after I die, and still not be able to do so very well because in that world without limits I will need to apply these limits myself; or certainly have the autonomy to do so. What I will have is plenty of time to play plenty of holes.

 

 

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All Content provided by Francis Denehy

6 Degrees of Separation

6 degrees of separation

I propose that we can demystify consciousness, and so to an extent introduce to many more the potential of technologies that seek to replicate the human entity for future residence in more malleable substrates; by the following exercise.

I propose that one can propose any thought – as abstract or concrete – as simple or complex – as one likes and treat to the following steps; we can retrace this thoughts emerge from simple physical nature.

1.           The thought itself is an amalgamation of some experiential reference contained in the synaptic connections and larger neural network (or refers to something in ones past and ones original design); and the application of language

 2.       ‘Conscious’ thought is an evolution of practising speech. The Supplementary Motor Cortex activates instructions prior to any physical movement of the body; or, in fact, prior to someone believing they are deciding to do something it is practiced in the supplementary cortex. This means that before you turn the steering wheel or move your foot you do a dress rehearsal in the supplementary motor cortex before the actual motor cortex directs movement. The first human language most likely evolved from an animalistic gesture-call system (dog barks and wags tail when pleased) para-language and basically motor neuronal actions before complexity made it seem such a non-movement part of the brain. Of course the use of the vocal chords and diaphragm etc clearly is controlled by motor neurons and it can be suggested that non-uttered background complexity mirrors the supplementary motor cortex’s role perhaps when man first began to accord certain meaning to certain sounds by use and repetition and had to decide before whether or not this particular sound was appropriate to this particular situation. In essence then while we did not cross the savannahs pondering our destinies we reacted to situations by deciding on what set of sounds most appropriately reflected the stimuli we were experiencing – and we gained social benefits from improving our ability to illustrate with these sounds with more complex preparation (thought)

3.        This abstract thought then can be shown to have evolved in the individual from their own experiences and exposures to language, circumstance etc and their inherited evolutionary capacity to use language to communicate with others. It is important to see though that the thought is in itself coming from the same process type as that which allows you to breath, run or lift your hand. Neuroscientists have studied simple creatures such as Eric. R. Kandel’s viewing the gill withdrawal reflex through classical conditioning via hebbian learning in a marine mollusc. What this means in short is that as a little sea creature reacted to stimuli by withdrawing the gill. The more this withdrawal occurred the stronger the connection between the neurons at the point of the synapse became; and so we learn. Of course, neuronal activity and processing vast quantities of stimuli and parallel processing followed, probably by, probability and game-theory based ‘decision-making’ architecture is why we can genuinely look at our own species in awe – but is importantly not a reason to imagine that anything other than this synaptic learning is occurring at the base

4.           Evolutionary biology can tell us much about how simple amoeba like creatures could have evolved into the immensely complex human – but the most important thing it tells us is; that it did. In truth with the wide variety of the current animal kingdom we can see remnants of almost all evolutionary routes we may have travelled down this path of increasing complexity; but in all cases we have seen in the last half century that the life-forms that surround us are the result of a protein generating code or DNA. There is a subjectivity trap in consciousness/thought which makes it exceedingly difficult to accept (as in point 3 above) that there is in fact no fundamental difference between an economists musing and a birds flight or an amoeba’s a worm excreting waste. There is an individual organism conducting certain actions through its unity of identity and its physical attention and activity in certain areas which in all cases can be seen as the result of certain cellular processes.

5.             Now there is still nothing beyond conjecture as to how what we perceive as these autonomous ‘thinking’ amoeba or human evolved from matter we see as non-autonomous and non-thinking e.g. rock; and one can only add to that conjecture at this point as the secrets of approximately 3.8 billion years ago when ‘life’ began on earth are not so easily discerned but people allude to concepts such as swarm intelligence and how, as an example a group of ants by means of releasing pheromone which evaporate quickly, and so by successfully following the ant, coincidentally, traversing the shortest path between two points eventually more will choose this path; and you have arrived at an intelligent ‘decision’. It can be seen that neurons may well be behave closely to individual computers on a network that are connected in a whole array of swarm intelligent based architectural layers of varying levels of influence. Again we can extrapolate that unless ‘magic’ entered at around this point in history again probability resides in our intelligence being just many many times more complex than that rocks changing over time with gradually impacting elements from its environment, shifting positions and so on; or an intermediary point like a star that we would not see as intelligent but conducts relatively complex forms of transformation of basic elements and, in fact, conducts nuclear reactions that took any very great minds a great amount of time to arrive at here on earth.

We can hear the common arguement at this point as ‘but the sun doesn’t know it is doing this, like we do’. Well I am hoping that the arguements above will show that it is not that the sun does know but that we don’t know either. These thoughts of ‘doing’ are just ‘doing’ in themselves as explained above with language evolving from motor movements and motor movements accommodated within the framework of cells by the gradual accumulation of complex organisms via the long process of evolution. To repeat the subjective trap of ‘I think, therefore, I am’ needs analysis within the context of ‘Yes, I am thinking, but ‘I am also walking, receiving sensory information reflecting the weather, secreting saliva, digesting food and on and on; and in all this, too – I am.

6.           Having journeyed from the thought to the brain, from the brain, to the neuron, to the cell, and tangentially to a rock or a star – we can try to bring the concept of intelligence back along our journey to fundamental physics as we understand them, now.

To begin perhaps viewing intelligence as learning and memory we can see the application from an individual’s progress through life plus the inherited genes progress through history – if nothing else ‘life’ has in all of its forms had a memory sufficient to procreate and learned via interactions

I would like to concentrate on this for a moment and suggest that learning is merely an interaction followed by a decision and the generation of a memory. Hopefully, we can see all of this easily enough when reflecting  a humans learning but what of a particle. Well without delving any deeper the the standard model of physics lets look at one particle ‘bumping into another and having its path changed. There is an interaction – the bump, there is a decision – the new pathway, and there is learning – the new pathway into the future. We need to add the increasing complexity plus autonomy (what is it that makes one particle that particle only; and will not allow a rock to be another rock). Perhaps this autonomy can be seen as the recipe for the divergence that, in fact, gives us existence. The notion of asymmetry is a very important one in much of theoretical physics. We may ask if one thing was not unique then would not everything have to be the same. And if everything was the same how can anything be identified. It is via differentials that we can identify and these differentials are generated by the informational code; i.e. some of this plus a little of that gives me copper or some spin plus some colour gives me this particle and so on. And so information lies at the core of all and the symmetry of nothingness broke into existence and we, humans are wonderfully complex (vastly more complex than any other thing in the universe; but we are still of this universe. We are made of everything around us – as are our thoughts

Most Important

The most important thing in life is:
Staying Alive

Clearly all else is dependent on this primary necessity. From a baby’s fighting an illness to the empathic sorrow that those near to the deceased have always expressed, we know self-preservation is the most fundamental drive.
We also know that at any given moment we will, for the most, do whatever is necessary to survive to the next.
So if it could be shown to you that there are ways that you could keep on living beyond what is called ‘your natural life’ would you dismiss it?